Greetings fellow listers!

I work at a small historic house museum that is in the process of setting up an online museum shop as part of our larger website. We have decided to go with PayPal for cost and ease of use reasons, but are now stumped as to establishing shipping costs. 

From what we have gathered online from other museum shops, many people charge shipping based on the price of the purchase--a $10 purchase is charged less for shipping than a $100 purchase. In crunching the numbers here, that just won't work for us. We use UPS for our shipping, and residential delivery and fuel surcharges mean that to charge shipping based on the total price of the purchase would result in us LOSING money! We would be paying more to UPS than the customer would be paying for shipping.

We are at the point where we have decided to charge shipping based on the weight of the item(s) purchased. We do not do enough business that we can hope for things to even out at the end. i.e., we can't expect one customer's shortfall in shipping a heavy item to be covered by someone else overpaying for a lighter one. 

Does anyone else use this shipping formula?

Does anyone else face the same problem--losing money on shipping when charging based on the amount of the purchase?

Does anyone use a carrier other than UPS? 

Why did/didn't your institution decided to charge shipping based on the overall purchase price?

THANK YOU for any help you can send my way!

Heidi Wing
Curator
Stonewall Jackson House
Lexington, VA

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